This production, in a recent translation by Crimp, blows some new life into this absurdist comedy from the late 1950s. Director Timar casts young actors (Marcus Kyd and Jessica Browne-White) in place of the original script's specification of an old man aged 95 and an old woman aged 94 (a program note tells us that they're playing at playing old characters, but this but never comes off) and dispenses with the closing speech of the Orator altogether. Instead, he (eventually) fills the stage with more than a hundred mismatched chairs (lawn furniture, contract seating, wheelchairs, elegant fauteuils) and calls upon his cast to fill the performance with more than a hundred corresponding schticks. Kyd and Browne-White are a pair of cranked-up, punked-out left-behinds from the Three Stooges, their hair dyed complementary shades of navy blue and orange, breaking the fourth wall to exhort cheers from the audience or agreement with a rhetorical point.

In this cartoon landscape, there's plenty of opportunity for a seating snafu or an uncooperative audience member, and that's part of this production's charm. Indeed, the show takes on the most energy when the two actors are shuffling chairs into place, underscored by a funky sound design by Benjamin Chabas and adapted by N. Eric Knauss—at one point Kyd is hustling folding chairs into place like a paratroop commander pushing soldiers out the airplane door. And yet, in a scene that follows shortly thereafter, he achieves so much with a simple, direct address to the audience: "No need to push."

The playing space, as Round House's Silver Spring black box is configured, is exceptionally wide and shallow, in part to accommodate the ominous special effects in the play's closing moments. The blocking is consistent with the ground plan, which means that sometimes the man and the woman are playing on opposite sides of the stage, and even in the back row we can't see both of them at the same time. We're forced to choose between watching one or the other, or snapping between them like a spectator at a peculiar tennis match. It's an unnerving, distancing effect, and it prevents us from identifying too strongly with this hapless couple. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.

posted: 11:34:32 PM  

Susan Stamberg profiles playwright Sarah Ruhl, author of the recent local productions Passion Play: A Cycle and The Clean House, with audio clips from the Woolly Mammoth show.

posted: 12:17:44 AM